by Rich Hawkins
“I told you to be quiet, Andy,” Weir hissed.
“Sorry.”
Seth’s hand tightened on the axe handle. A primal sort of fear nestled in his guts. He tried to not breathe too loud in case it provoked the wolves. He watched them through the falling snow.
The face-off lasted less than two minutes. The alpha turned away from the men and trotted to the other side of the street, the rest of the pack following in order, watching all the time.
Soon they vanished into the white fog, like ashen ghosts in a peculiar dream.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Moving through the town, they saw a serpentine monster coiled among the remains of a gutted building, and fled into nearby streets before it woke.
Tattered remnants of humanity persisted in isolated pockets, but they withdrew from sight when approached. They were wide-eyed and dirty-faced, clutching makeshift cudgels and bats. Filthy, bedraggled, and injured. Seth tried to engage with them, but to no success.
“Why won’t they talk to us?” Andy said.
“They’re barely managing,” Weir replied.
Ruby watched the last of the ragged survivors disappear into the warren of back streets. “Maybe they’re scared of the rifle. I wonder what happened to them. At least they’re still alive.”
“People survive,” said Weir.
“God help them,” Ruby muttered.
Andy glanced at the sky. “God help us all.”
They walked on.
Weir led them to the hospital, which was abandoned except for a few shambling maniacs, driven mad by the terror of the last few days. Weir threatened them with his rifle to keep them away, and they retreated into darkened rooms, all gleaming eyes and cries of distress. A little later, when they ambushed the group with knives and bloodied hammers, Weir was forced to shoot them.
The police station had been taken over and fortified by armed survivors who chased the four survivors away with warning shots and sincere threats.”At least there are people still alive,” said Seth.
Weir looked around, disappointment on his face. “Those people don’t give a shit about anyone else.”
Not long after midday they left the town behind and headed for Briar Slope.
*
A mile farther on, they found the corpses of several cows lying scattered in the snow upon a country road. The cattle had been partially eaten; their throats opened, their rib cages exposed and broken, viscera trailing. Their shredded hides were half-frozen. There was no smell. Everything was covered in a fine dust of snow.
Seth looked up at a line of crows watching from upon a telephone wire. They just stared back at him until he turned away.
There were no boot prints or tracks nearby, but areas of the snow seemed to have been disturbed in mounds. When Seth looked closer at the surface of the snow, he saw shallow trails, about half a metre wide, leading away from the animal corpses.
“Something was hungry,” Ruby said, chewing on her fingernail. Her other hand remained wrapped in the silver cross.
A frown darkened Weir’s face as he studied the remains.
Seth stepped towards him. “What’s wrong?”
“Do you hear that?” Andy said behind them. “Sounds like a low rumbling.”
Weir looked at Seth, concern in his eyes, his mouth tensing. And he had barely raised his rifle when the snow around them exploded in a maelstrom of awful screeching and serpentine forms.
Seth fell back, crying out, as Weir’s rifle barked several times. Snow fell and swirled all about him, finding his eyes and disorientating him. Andy and Ruby screamed from nearby. Seth pivoted to one side to see Andy struggling with something on the ground.
Weir’s rifle rang out again with deafening staccato gunfire.
And then Seth saw one of the things that had erupted from the snow. It was some kind of worm-creature, limbless and segmented, as big as a dog, with red skin and an eyeless head. It emerged from the snow, reared before him, and opened its circular mouth to bare tiny, sharp teeth. The flesh around its mouth was pinkish and loosely flapping.
It lunged towards him.
He swung his axe once, screaming in a manic fugue born from trauma, and buried its blade halfway down the nightmare’s abdomen. Black blood splashed in the snow and across Seth’s face. The worm writhed on the end of the axe, squealing and snapping, until he raised one booted foot and stamped on its glistening head.
He wiped his face, spat the sulphuric taste of the worm’s blood from his mouth, and pulled his axe free. More dead worms lay in the snow, punctured with bullets. The surviving worms burrowed into the snow and fled from Weir’s rifle-fire.
Seth went to Andy, who was on his knees next to a dying worm. Ruby was slowly rising to her feet; she seemed unharmed. The worm twitched and shuddered, impaled by Andy’s knife, until its heart finally stopped. Andy stared at the worm, breathing hard, and he flinched when Seth touched him on the shoulder. He blinked, opened his mouth, but said nothing. Seth and Ruby helped him up and they turned back to Weir.
There must have been over a dozen dead worms in the snow. They were scattered amongst the cattle remains. It was all…flesh.
Weir hunched over, retching and spitting. He straightened, wiped his face with his hands. His coat was streaked with black blood.
“Vicious little motherfuckers.” He reloaded his rifle and stared in the direction the worms had fled. “Everyone all right?”
“Yeah,” Seth and Ruby answered together. Andy nodded, wiping his mouth, his eyes damp and tired.
“We need to run,” said Weir.
“What?” asked Seth. “Why?”
“Something else is coming.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They struggled through the snow as the giant worm rose within the white fog and let out a shockingly loud shriek that tightened Seth’s bladder and took most of the strength from his legs.
“Keep moving!” Weir roared, glancing over his shoulder. The vibrations and juddering tremors in the ground threw them off-balance, and had them staggering and slipping. Seth risked a look back and wished he hadn’t when he saw the mother worm turn towards them and propel itself through the snow, swiping away trees, hedgerows, thickets and fences with its massive body. It would chase them down and snaffle them up, bones and all.
“Don’t stop,” Weir shouted. “Don’t look back! Run!”
Seth kicked his legs with all his strength, panting, each breath scraping in his throat. Andy pushed Ruby ahead and told her to keep moving. Weir urged them on from behind.
Seth was fading. He felt pathetic and overwhelmed, like an insignificant morsel for the god-mass of the giant mother worm. When Andy fell down, Seth collapsed with him, and they hit the snow in a bedraggled heap. Andy’s rattling sobs were the prominent sounds in Seth’s ears, before the worm shrieked again and obliterated all rational thought.
Weir and Ruby were upon them, pulling them to their feet, and they huddled in the presence of the approaching titan.
“Go on,” said Weir.
Seth looked at him. “What?”
Weir handed Seth his side-arm. “Take this and go. Make a run for it and find shelter. There’s a full magazine in the pistol.”
“I don’t know how to use it.”
Weir put his hand on Seth’s shoulder. “You’ll figure it out.” Then he turned away and aimed his rifle at the mother worm.
*
Seth, Ruby and Andy fled towards the houses ahead of them. Gunfire rattled from behind. Weir was shouting in defiance. The mother worm’s shrieks shook the ground and split the sky.
The hamlet was composed of less than a dozen houses scattered about a road that curved away in a south-westerly direction. Dead street lights loomed over them as they stumbled past abandoned cars and gardens lost to snow. The houses were intact, but held a sense of desolation and emptiness about them.
They fell through a doorway, and Seth slammed it shut behind them. Just another abandoned house. Pictures and keepsakes. A family h
ome left behind.
Under the stairs was a door that opened into the darkness of a cramped storage space. They ducked inside and closed the door. There was barely enough room for the three of them as they dropped to a crouch against the back wall of bare plaster.
They huddled together. The room smelled of musty paper and sawdust. Seth switched on his torch, and the light revealed Andy’s terrified face amid floating motes of dust. Ruby had screwed her eyes shut, and she clung to her silver cross with both hands.
Beyond the house, the sound of Weir’s rifle stopped and there was just the shrieking of the mother worm. Then the walls and the floor began shaking. A pile of magazines collapsed across the floor and clay pots rattled on a shelf.
They covered their heads with their arms and hunched down as the tremors worsened, seeming to grip the house and shake its foundations.
The torch fell from Seth’s grip and winked out. All was darkness. The shrieking became louder, deafening, and the sound of screaming metal filled the walls.
Seth closed his eyes and waited to die.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When they emerged from the room under the stairs, they found that the house’s walls had partially fallen in, and a drizzle of snow was falling through the ragged holes and wide gaps where most of the roof had been.
Debris everywhere, all over the floor, the rooms smashed to bits, the inner walls barely standing. Shattered bricks and plaster. Splintered wooden beams jutting from drifts of wreckage.
They picked their way through the remains of the hallway, coughing from the brick dust, plaster granules, and grit that covered them.
The front door hung from one set of twisted hinges. Seth wrenched it back and stepped outside, Andy and Ruby right behind him. They stood looking around, aghast and shivering.
The entire hamlet was in ruins around the buckled road. The smell of sewage and gas. The snow was slowly covering this new devastation.
There was no sign of the mother worm. No sign of Weir. They called out for him, looked for him amongst the wreckage, but he wasn’t to be found. Seth thought he must have been obliterated, wiped from existence.
Andy stood on the broken road, nudging fragments of tarmac with his foot, an appalled pallor on his face. He was weeping.
Ruby went to him and held his hand, neither of them saying a word. Seth stood with them. Then all three of them moved on.
*
“How far to your village, Seth?” Andy asked, breathing raggedly. Seth had given him the axe. Ruby hummed the slow tune of some old song.
They walked a narrow road hemmed in by thin trees. Their boots scraped through the snow.
“Not far,” Seth said. He kept one hand on the pistol buried deep in the pocket of his coat. His feet were freezing and his trembling guts forced bile into his chest. And in that moment, shaking with cold, the mere thought of the warmth of the sun on his face, of the warmth of his parents’ embrace, almost brought him to his knees.
“Do you think Weir’s dead?”
Seth didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer.
“He was a good man,” Andy added.
“Yes, he was.”
“I’d pray for Weir, if I still believed in God.” Andy seemed to remember Ruby’s silver cross, and glanced across to her as she walked beside him. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend or anything.”
Ruby looked at him. “It’s fine. I’m not offended. And even if I was, what would it matter now, in this new world? There are graver things to worry about.”
Andy dropped his gaze to the snow. “Fair enough. I just meant, uh…”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay.”
Ruby shook her head. “I’ve been asking myself a question ever since this started.”
“What question?” Seth said.
“Why would God let this happen?”
“That’s a good question. Have you found an answer?”
“I’m not sure I want to find one.”
“It’s something to think about, I suppose,” said Andy.
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
She offered him a slight smile. “Stop saying you’re sorry, Andy.”
Moments later the road sign for Seth’s village coalesced out the white fog ahead of them. It was furred with snow, tilting to one side.
BRIAR SLOPE – 1 mile
They moved past the sign, and half an hour later the blurred shapes of houses at the outskirts of the village soon appeared from the veil of swirling snow.
“Here we are,” Seth said. “We made it. We fucking made it.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Before the snow, the village had been home to over one thousand people, but now it stood deserted and derelict. This was Briar Slope, where he was born on a summer’s night in 1992. Where memories both good and bad were gathered and guarded like treasure.
They walked the main road into the village, stepping around wreckage and debris. They climbed over a fallen tree trunk.
Something of great size had passed through Briar Slope and cut a path of devastation, leaving many houses destroyed. There were bodies and splintered bones in the snow. Ripped clothes and rags hanging on the limbs of the trees that were still standing.
“Oh my God,” Andy whispered, looking around with wide eyes. The axe shook in his hand. In silence Ruby gawped at the destruction.
Reluctantly, Seth pulled Weir’s pistol from his pocket and held it facing the ground. He kept his finger away from the trigger. Bile frothed behind his sternum. He wanted to vomit, and tremors ran up his arms.
They walked past the village shop, which was burnt to carbon and cinders.
Farther on, they sighted an old man in a trench coat sitting on a wooden bench at one side of the street. He watched them approach, and gave a pitiful smile as they stopped. He noted Seth’s pistol and shrugged.
“Hello,” Andy said, staying protectively close to Ruby.
“Hello,” the man replied. His eyes were watery and rimmed with pinkish skin. “Just passing through?”
“I live here,” said Seth.
“One of the monsters passed through here, as you can see.”
“Was it a giant worm?” Andy asked.
The man wiped his mouth. “No, not that one. It was something different. A god, you might say. An eater of souls and flesh.” He exhaled, his breath shuddering. “Most of the remaining people – those who hadn’t disappeared in the snow – had already evacuated for the coasts. But there were still a few of us left when it arrived. I was the only one to survive.” He said this last statement with something like pride, a twitch of a smile at the side of his mouth. The man’s insanity gleamed in the light of his eyes but Seth suddenly recognised the man. It was almost funny.
“I know you. Your name is Alec Palmer. You used to be the village butcher, before you passed the shop on to your son.”
The man frowned, spat over his shoulder. “That was my old life. My son and his family are gone. Now I show the way to those who pass through here.”
“What does that mean?”
“I tell people about the monsters. I tell them about the crossing of worlds.”
“Of course you do,” Andy said dismissively, keeping the axe half-raised. “You’re as mad as a bucket of frogs.”
Palmer snorted. “Probably. But what other choice is there but to be mad in a world of gods and monsters?”
No one answered him. Seth even agreed a little with him and found some sympathy for the man.
“I will see the extinction of Man,” Palmer said, and then he rose from the bench on stiff legs and stretched his arms.
Seth, Ruby and Andy stepped back a little.
“Good luck,” Palmer said, and walked off in the direction they had come from, to disappear in the falling snow.
*
Soon afterwards they arrived at Seth’s house and stood before it in the street, staring at its remains. The front wall of the house was
in pieces on the lawn and scattered around the driveway. The roof had caved in, and the rooms were wrecked.
Seth found it hard to swallow, as if his throat was stuffed with dirt and sand. His heart ached and crashed. His legs went all watery as panic and wretched dread filled him up.
Andy put his hand on Seth’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, man.”
“I have to know,” Seth said. “I have to know.” Shrugging off Andy’s hand, he stepped over the buckled garden gate to search for his parents amongst the ruins.
He found their ravaged, frozen corpses sprawled together beneath a large piece of debris. Their faces were obscured by smashed bricks and mortar, and for that he was almost relieved.
Seth kneeled down and put his hands over his face and cried for a long while.
*
“Do you want to bury them?” Ruby asked him, her voice low and soft in the cold air.
Seth took his hands from his face and wiped his eyes dry. He shuddered out a breath. “Best to leave them; they’re together, for what it’s worth. And I don’t think I could drag them out from under the debris.”
Ruby recovered a blanket from the ruins, and Seth draped it over his parents’ remains. Afterwards Ruby went back out to the street and stood with Andy on the pavement, while Seth considered whether to search the wreckage of his home for any personal effects. But in the end, all he could bring himself to recover from the ruins were a few photos, before turning away, unable to look at the house any longer. And after he’d said goodbye to his old home and his parents, he walked out to the street and stood beside Andy and Ruby.
“What shall we do, now?” Andy said.
Seth looked up and down the street, along the rows of broken houses. The church had lost its steeple.
Somewhere beyond the village, terrible beasts wailed and cried in the wastelands.
